THE AMERICAN PILOTThe Other Place, Stratford-upon-AvonOpened 5 May, 2005***

Well, thank you very much, David Greig. Scarcely have I reviewed your
recent London openings, Pyrenees and The Cosmonaut's Last Message,
and explained how you work by oblique approaches and hints, before you
unveil a play in Stratford that seems firmly located in the global war
on terror.

Of course, things are far from that literal. On one level The American
Pilot is about the clash of cultures between the United States and
an unspecific mountainous Middle Eastern region (could be northern Iraq,
could be most of Afghanistan; what matters are the perennial civil war
and the antagonism). A farmer and his family, a local trader, the area's
warlord and his more ideological lieutenant all have to negotiate a cultural-moral
maze following the discovery of the crash-landed, injured airman of the
title.

However, with Greig it's less a matter of A versus B than of the ways
in which we articulate and/or interrogate our ideas. For much of the first
half, characters all seem to be trying to formulate large concepts that
their words cannot pin down: the Captain (David Rintoul), describing how
they could not understand any intelligence data the Pilot might possess,
says, "You may as well interrogate a word about the meaning of a sentence."
Language itself is a main area of engagement: there's a lot of wry byplay
about characters not understanding each other's tongues even though every
word we hear is in fact English.

As the play progresses, however, these half-grasped abstracts – matters
of philosophical faith, almost – are tested against pragmatic speculations,
as the locals try to decide the best course of action: return the American,
ransom him or kill him, and in each case, why? The particularities of the
situation, having quickly given way to a broader conceptual level, then
return afresh into detailed focus. And all the while, we're also being
tested as to how well we allow these ideas through our ideological filters
(Americans in such a context: good guys or bad guys?).

Ramin Gray's production hits the combination of detail and unfussiness
exemplified by latter-day Peter Brook: actors sit upstage when not performing,
occasionally adding musical accompaniment together with Ali Shahsavari
on santur. It doesn't leave as much space for personal resonance as this
unsettlingly prolific writer's more haunting works, but it's a more complex
fable than at first appears.